Word: abt
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...could be the preface to a softening in the stand of the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), which currently strongly supports rent control and limitations on condominium conversion. If Mary Allen Wilkes, the "condo candidate," runs well or even wins, or if she loses and her votes transfer to Wendy Abt, the CCA candidate viewed as most flexible on housing issues, change will very definitely...
...least 2000 Cambridge apartments have been converted to condominiums in recent years. What the Wilkes and Abt vote could show is that condo owners have emerged as a distinct political bloc in this city. Two years ago it appeared they hadn't, no candidate appealed directly to them, and none benefited from their support. This year, though, Wilkes identified herself from the start as a liberal, except on housing issues, where she favors the right of some tenants to buy their own apartments as condominiums and is at strongest equivocal in her support of rent control...
...Abt--though much less directly, and perhaps not by her own choice--seems to be appealing to similar feelings. She is the first CCA candidate not to win the endorsement of the city's tenants, a rebuff delivered at a late summer convention. Abt has promised not to vote against rent control. But she also told city tenants that "rent control may not be the best or only way to protect low and moderate income people," and said that many condominium purchasers who wanted only to own their own homes and had "injured no one" were being caught in "complicated...
...buzz word for Abt and Wilkes supporters seems to be "flexibility." "We want to send a message to the CCA," says John Hudson, chairman of the Cambridge Condominium Network Steering Committee, who sports a Wilkes button on his lapel. The message, he adds, is that the CCA has been "inflexible" on housing issues. And as Abt wrote in her statement to tenants, "without better data, it is irresponsible to dismiss alternatives and to insist on Rent Control and condo controls in exactly their current forms...
...problem is--as the Rent Control Task Force convention vote showed--that tenants do not feel that wholehearted support of rent and condominium controls are irresponsible. For Abt (and for every current member of the city council save David Sullivan, who rents his home) economic necessity is not an issue. Tenant activists see charges that rent control subsidizes the rich--which in some cases it surely does--as a rhetorical cover for attacking the program which protects them. "If debate is ever opened on rent control, the forces against it are so strong that it will emerge irrevocably weakened...